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| Warbeck |
Quills: (Stephen Warbeck) It's safe to say that the
2000 film
Quills is probably the worst "date movie" to ever
exist. Even mentally impure viewers with a sickly morbid and perverted
sense of humor might have trouble digesting the grotesquely horrific
dramatization of the life and death of controversial French writer
Marquis de Sade in
Quills. Not much was to be liked about de Sade
as a person, though his confinement in the aftermath of the French
Revolution and continued writing of provocative stories and plays made
him into something of a legend. The movie, directed by Philip Kaufman in
his decline, absolutely butchered the facts of de Sade's life in the
process of over-emphasizing the man's extreme sexual deviancy and
arguably insane mannerisms. Glamorizing the end of his life,
Quills depicts the author's crazed interactions (conveyed with
zeal by Geoffrey Rush) with the administrator and laundry girl of his
insane asylum, using the latter to smuggle out his manuscripts to an
eager public. The government, meanwhile, sends an enforcer to the asylum
to silence "the Marquis" but he ultimately proves just a demented and
has sexual issues of his own. Not immune to carnal tensions are the
aforementioned administrator and the laundress, played by Joaquin
Phoenix and Kate Winslet, the pair suffering passions unrealized until
one graphically fantasizes about fornicating with the dead corpse of the
other. Rush's performance of de Sade includes extraordinary body
mutilation and fecal depravity, concluding with a completely fabricated,
shocking death scene. Aside from strong acting performances and the
usual technical prowess of these costume dramas, there's really no
reason to witness
Quills if not for what Time magazine labeled as
its "vulgarly unamusing soft-gore porn." An understandable choice to
score the film was Stephen Warbeck, whose ability to provide adequate to
exemplary music for these period circumstances was affirmed by an
Academy Award win for
Shakespeare in Love two years prior. As one
would expect, he brought his recognizable classical sensibilities to
Quills, but not in the kind of package you would expect to hear.
Warbeck indeed uses familiar tones to address the period of the tale
(though the ethnicity of the score is still rooted in British and Celtic
flavors rather than French) and the religious component, but from there
he goes as wild as the script with experimental instrumentation and
frighteningly alienating material that would, in a creative sense, make
Thomas Newman proud. Unfortunately, the resulting score as a whole is
completely insufferable, lacking any cohesive element to collect these
disparate parts into a meaningful narrative.
To say that
Quills is an unpleasant listening
experience would be an understatement, but some may find the music's
extremely grim tone to be enticingly bizarre. Warbeck is all over the
map in this music, writing a main theme of slight classical resonance
for the orchestra and a lovely, Celtic melody on whistle and clarinet
for the unrealized love between the administrator and laundry girl.
Existing separately from these two identities is the application of the
opening verses of French children's song "Au Clair de la Lune" to de
Sade specifically, performed by Rush throughout the film (and heard in
song form during the opening beheading) but not incorporated into the
score or even represented on the soundtrack album. A choir is employed
to accentuate the perversity of the faux-pious environment and to
indulge the fantasy sequences with troubling dissonance, utilizing tones
familiar to John Barry's
The Lion in Winter. From there, Warbeck
goes instrumentally insane, collecting a shawm, serpent, cittern,
mandolin, electric guitar, didgeridoo, damnoni, filophone, and a variety
of whipped and struck percussive effects involving sticks and buckets
and merging them with various blown instruments with their ends placed
underwater. Although the experimental, choral, and orchestral portions
are pretty much segregated in the score, Warbeck alternates between them
at will, usually without any tonal satisfaction. Nearly the entirety of
this score is meant to unsettle, the only major exception being the
bittersweet love theme expressed beautifully in "The Abbe and
Madelaine." The main theme, though introduced sternly in "The Marquis
and the Scaffold," erupts with choral magnificence (alongside hints of
the doomed love theme) in "The End: A New Manuscript," though even here,
these performances are tinged with the lunacy of the specialty
instruments. Some of the purely experimental passages, such as
"Aphrodisiac" and parts of "The Marquis' Cell at Charenton" and "The
Last Story," barely qualify as music, instead emulating the sound
effects of an alchemist's laboratory. The choir's role intentionally
disintegrates along with the morality of the tale, eventually becoming
atonally impossible by the infamous "sex with corpse" scene. The evil
doctor, Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), is provided tortuous string,
brass, and percussion rhythms of intense difficulty in "Royer-Collard
and Bouchon." And, finally, there is the closing cue in the resolution
scene, "The Printing Press," with arguably the worst mangling of
medieval sounds to ever be recorded for a source-like environment. The
problem with
Quills in sum is not its intolerable components, but
rather Warbeck's inability to draw them together into a clear narrative.
There was so much potential in this collection of ideas that it's
painful to hear the end result stagger so aimlessly.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Stephen Warbeck reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.29
(in 7 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.22
(in 9,024 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a short note from the composer about the score.
